Our team has been working hard during the past several months to open source our testing tools: JT Harness and ME Framework. The bits are now available through the cqME project and last week's JavaOne was a great opportunity to spread the word and present our efforts to the wide audience. Until recently our primary focus was conformance testing and we rarely had an opportunity to talk to application developers. This is a brief overview of our last week's activities.

The slogan for this year is "Test More, Port for Less". By conducting better quality and conformance testing and by sharing tests and tools with the community, we are improving the overall implementation quality and reducing fragmentation. Our logo is the Duke of Justice. He resembles Femida, the blindfolded goddess with a scale in one hand and the spec in the other. Enforcing conformance to the spec is what conformance and quality is about.

Roman Zelov, Alexander Glasman and I did a session on Java ME testing (TS-5906) where we covered a range of testing and debugging tools and some of the basic Java ME application and platform testing principles. For more reading on the topic you can refer to Alexey Popov's very detailed blog which covers many of the things we talked about in the session. Roman and Alexander also showed the latest version of the NetBeans plug-in for test development. The plug-in is a work in progress, you can track the status in Alexander's blog.

The detailed introduction to ME Framework and Netbeans plug-in is now available as an online hands-on lab (LAB-9530). A free Sun Developer Network account is needed to get access to it. The latest version of ME Framework and Netbeans plug-in is always available at the cqME project site.

We had a booth on the show floor where we were showing the latest testing tools. Our demo rig was based on a Sun's Opteron box running Linux connected to a Texas Instrument's OMAP730 development board running Sun's CLDC HI stack on Monta Vista Linux. We also used a couple of off-the-shelf devices for test export feature demonstrations.

After talking to the friendly application developers, we now see that we are on the right track with our tools. Application and platform testers have similar needs and are fighting similar problems (device limitations, lack of test automation, implementation bugs, platform fragmentation). A good set of challenges for cqME project to address.